Theatre is artifice, scenes abstracted from everyday life and superimposed to achieve some kind of narrative effect in a blank or symbolic space. In this way performance is never an approximation, but a kind of distortion, an interpretation of some aspect of social or cultural life. Frustrated with these limitations, other performative genres have developed which attempt to overcome them. Documentary theatre is defined as the attempt to relive the truth of an event, whether by sticking to a factual narrative or using non-actors. In this sense it may have more in common with forms of performance found outside the traditional theatre, as radio travelogue or television documentary.
Berlin based theatrical group Rimini Protokoll have devised new and ever more ingenious ways to dramatise this emerging genre of documentary theatre. One work called Lagos Business Angels bought them to Lagos, capital of Nigeria, and one of the fastest growing urban economies in the world. Here they recruited more than a dozen individual small business people to tell their unique stories, which they laid out in a stage setting for the Brussels festival Kunstenfestivaldesarts in 2012. The audience was invited to tour around an listen to an extraordinary array of stories from Austrian textile merchants who sell their handmade fabrics exclusively to Nigerian clients for their weddings, to shoe salesmen, people working in technology and shipping, used car salespeople, and even a German pencil manufacturer who had had unfortunate dealings with shady traders and was eventually invited by the Nigerian government to work for one of their anti-corruption watchdogs.
Just knowing that all of these people genuinely would return to these jobs after the festival intensified the audience’s interest in their lives, in the same was perhaps as reality TV but with a more sophisticated format and approach. Another project, variously called 100% Stockholm, 100% Zurich, 100% Melbourne, and the upcoming 100% Darwin, on 9th August this year, find a proportionally representative combination of the population of a city in 100 random people. What is compelling about this project is not only that the individuals are chosen for how their characteristics match the general statistics of the city, but how the group manage to bring these unlikely individuals together to tell a compelling story – giving the audience a sense of connection both with the characters on stage and with one another.
Rimini Proktoll maintain an active schedule. Upcoming performances include: Situation Rooms – A multiplayer video piece in Hamburg, Lausanne and Berlin, Remote X in Lausanne and Vilnius, and 100% Darwin in Darwin.
